Get in line for zero gravity; and, oh, bring $250,000

When Frank Kavanaugh was a boy, he marveled at the Apollo launches, devoured science fiction and guzzled orange-hued Tang. “The astronauts drank Tang,” he recalls, “and I wanted to be an astronaut.”

For Kavanaugh and other children of the 1960s, “the space race was in the fabric of our lives,” he said. “It was the cool place where people were innovating, exploring, dreaming.”

Today, at age 53, the Aliso Viejo private equity executive is ready to relive the dream – up close.

Kavanaugh, who made a fortune manufacturing explosive-resistant trucks during the Iraq War, is among more than a dozen Orange County residents and nearly 100 Californians who have reserved places on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceline.

The Mojave-based company is promising a two-hour trip in a six-passenger rocket, vaulting amateur astronauts 68 miles beyond Earth’s surface. Company news releases tout “an out-of-the-seat, zero-gravity experience with astounding views of the planet from the black sky of space.”

Tickets cost $250,000 (raised last year from $200,000).

“My kids say, ‘Dad, you’re totally not an astronaut,’ ” Kavanaugh said with a boyish grin. “But in my little brain I am. I believe space is an important part of our future.”

Of some half-dozen private space companies, Virgin Galactic appears to be the furthest along on the tourism path. Founded a decade ago by Richard Branson, the flamboyant British entrepreneur, the company was buoyed five years ago by a $390 million infusion from Aabar Investments, an Abu Dhabi government-owned firm.

The start date, first scheduled for 2007, has been repeatedly postponed. But Branson now says passenger flights will begin by the end of this year, and he will ride in the first rocket with members of his family.

That’s assuming the current engine is powerful enough, future test flights prove successful and the Federal Aviation Administration grants a final license.

CELEBRITIES IN SPACE

So far, Virgin Galactic reports $80 million in ticket sales from 700 would-be passengers in 58 nations. Among the purchasers: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ashton Kutcher, Justin Bieber and the Winklevoss twins, of Facebook fame, who paid in bitcoin.

In the March issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Lady Gaga poses in a glittery flight suit, claiming “I honestly can’t wait” to perform on a Virgin Galactic spaceship with “a message of love that blasts into the beyond.” (The company “would be delighted to welcome her,” a spokeswoman said, “but we cannot confirm at this point” that she has bought a ticket.)

Orange County’s future passengers include a Fountain Valley medical device inventor who races Formula One cars; a Santa Ana mortgage lending mogul who played a millionaire on “The Real Gilligan’s Island” reality show; and the founder of Irvine’s Center for Living Peace, who was once married to a software magnate.

Ticket-holder David L. Horowitz, former owner of what was once Orange County’s biggest concrete company, Standard Concrete,insists, “It’s not all rich business guys.” At one astronaut gathering, he said, he met a San Diego scientist who had mortgaged her home to buy a ticket.

Horowitz, 62, signed up for the ride about eight years ago, one of a “founders” group of 100 investors. “For me it’s the visual thing – the black of space, the blue of Earth, the curve of the Earth,” Horowitz said. “And the fact I would play a part in the pioneer history of private commercial space flight.”

A total of 542 people in history have traveled to space – all part of government programs. Only a handful of civilians have made the trip, including Los Angeles investment manager Dennis Tito, who paid $20 million, and Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi, who went twice for a total of $60 million.

CHECKING OFF THE BUCKET LIST

By comparison, Virgin Galactic might seem a bargain. But Tito, Simonyi and others who traveled with Russia’s cash-starved space program flew 220 miles up, to the International Space Station. Virgin Galactic trips are to be suborbital, swooping briefly above the Karman line, which, at 62 miles beyond Earth, marks the beginning of space.

Still, the adventurous envision a rare opportunity.

“It was on my bucket list,” said Anthony Nobles, a biomedical entrepreneur who recently bought a ticket. “I’ve done everything else on the list.”

Nobles, 49, grew up poor in Detroit, and went on to launch several surgical suture companies, including Sutura Inc. and Nobles Medical Technologies II. He is best known in Orange County for his spectacular Fountain Valley Halloween displays with scores of actors and robots attracting thousands of visitors.

Nobles’ bucket list check-offs: driving his Formula One race cars on the streets of Monaco and flying his vintage war birds around Southern California.

“I’ve wanted to walk on the moon ever since I watched Neil Armstrong on TV,” he said. “When you’re an underprivileged kid in bad circumstances, you want to live on another planet.”

Virgin Galactic isn’t yet aiming for the moon. Launching a tourist shuttle is challenge enough. SpaceshipTwo, the company’s rocket, is a new version of a three-seat craft designed by ace engineer Burt Rutan that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 for reaching space twice in two weeks.

From a New Mexico spaceport, a twin-fuselage carrier, WhiteKnightTwo, is to ferry the eight-seat spaceship to an altitude of about 47,000 feet (9 miles). Then SpaceshipTwo will detach from the mothership, fire its engine and rocket into space reaching 2,500 mph (Mach 3.5).

YOU MAY FLOAT AROUND THE CABIN

After 55 seconds of burn, the engine cuts off. Passengers can unbuckle their seat belts and, for several minutes, float around the cabin before strapping back in for a fierce onset of gravitational force. At about 50,000 feet, the spacecraft rotates its tail upward to slow down and glide home.

Julie A. Hill, a 67-year-old Newport Beach executive, wants to be fully prepared for the experience. So she recently spent $3,000 for two days of flight simulation at the National Aerospace Training and Research Center in Pennsylvania.

Hill, a former real estate CEO who serves on corporate boards, said she and her brother, a vice president at Aerojet Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, bought tickets together three years ago and are expecting “a hell of a ride.”

Explaining the attraction, she quotes a World War II-era poem beloved by pilots: “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings ...”

Yet Hill retains her sense of humor about the trip.

“I told Richard Branson I won’t go up with Lady Gaga,” she said. “I don’t want her to sing to me in space. Also, can we pre-screen for barfers?”

Hill and another Orange County astronaut, Kelly Thornton Smith, the ex-wife of former Quest Software chief executive Vincent “Vinny” Smith, are friends with Branson. They have spent time at his Necker Island resort in the British Virgin Islands.

Smith, 48, said Branson encouraged her idea to start a yoga and meditation school, the Center for Living Peace, after her divorce. And he persuaded her to sign up for the space flight after she attended a few of his celebrity-studded gatherings for wealthy executives and philanthropists.

‘THEY HAVE GREAT PARTIES’

“I came to it for the excitement,” Smith said, whipping out her iPhone to show photos of several bashes. “The Galactic astronauts are a fun bunch. They have great parties.”

But Smith had another inspiration too. Her mother, a small-town middle school teacher, had applied to the Teacher in Space project on the Challenger shuttle, which blew up in 1986 with teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard.

“My mom taught earth science,” Smith said. “She wanted to go.”

The Challenger’s shadow hovers over a debate on whether the Federal Aviation Administration should issue safety rules for space tourism. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Costa Mesa, is leading an effort to curb proposed regulations on the budding industry.

Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic’s most recent test flight, in January, flew 13 miles high and fired its rocket for only 20 seconds – a fraction of the goal envisioned for its tourist launches.

The stuttering pace has left some critics wondering whether, rather than a viable business, the enterprise may turn out to be a mere case study in brilliant branding, sprinkling stardust on Branson’s sprawling empire of 400 companies from airlines to music festivals to mobile phones.

The tickets, several would-be astronauts noted, are refundable.

J. Edwin Holliday, however, is not one of the doubters. Holliday, 70, a Laguna Niguel-based partner in a Los Angeles investment firm, L&S Advisors, is a longtime pilot who, until recently, flew his own plane to meet with clients. “I have no apprehensions,” he said.

“They’ve been flying the airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, for three years and they’ve gotten the bugs out. Now they’re flying the spaceship.”

The son of a West Virginia bus driver, Holliday was among the first to buy a ticket, in early 2006. “I was in high school when Sputnik went up,” he said. “I always wanted to go to space.”

He asks: “Have you seen the movie ‘Gravity’? The Earth will look like a big ball. It will be life altering, a unique experience.”

S.F. TO SINGAPORE IN TWO HOURS

Galactic executives are already looking beyond once-in-a-lifetime tourist jaunts. The eventual goal: suborbital transcontinental travel. San Francisco to Singapore in two hours. Dubai to Vancouver in 90 minutes. Chinese and Russian billionaires could pop over to second homes in the south of France for a weekend.

A 2012 report by The Tauri Group, Alexandria, Va.-based consultants, which was partly funded by the FAA, suggests a market for about 4,000 suborbital fliers within a decade.

Being one of 700 current customers isn’t enough for Glenn B. Stearns, founder of Santa Ana’s Stearns Lending and related companies, who boasts that his firm is the nation’s second-largest privately held mortgage company with $500 million in annual revenues.

Reached on a yacht in the British Virgin Islands, Stearns, 50, said he has invested $17 million in developing a new island resort with Branson. In exchange, he said, “I want to be on the first flight. I’m definitely planning on it.”

And why? “It’s my personality,” he said. “I don’t like to be like all the others.”

Stearns and his wife, Mindy, a former KTLA entertainment reporter, gained notoriety a few years ago for playing “The Millionaire and His Wife” on the TBS reality show “The Real Gilligan’s Island.”

Mindy Stearns, speaking from the yacht, said she has no interest in space travel. “I’m so grounded,” she quipped.

As for her husband’s plans, “She said, ‘Get your affairs in order – your life insurance,” Glenn Stearns said. “It was sort of joking. Or sort of not.”